Fake News Day

Today – October 30, 2014 – marks the 76th anniversary of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast. On this day in 1938, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air unleashed their radio version of H.G. Wells’s classic novel of a Martian invasion, adapted by writer Howard Koch into a series of fake news bulletins. The show perfectly captured the American zeitgeist in that year before the outbreak of World War II, and it caused a terrific stir – seriously frightening some listeners, prompting calls for government censorship of radio, and catapulting the 23-year-old Welles to stardom.

Welles’s War of the Worlds and Stewart and Colbert’s rally share an anniversary purely by coincidence; Stewart explained to his Daily Show audience that they chose the date solely for convenience. Yet these events have much more in common than a quirk of the calendar. The myth of Welles’s broadcast, that it proved Americans believed anything they heard on the radio, was a product of the same kind of journalistic haste and fear-mongering that Stewart and Colbert satirized at the Rally to Restore Sanity. The issues they raised in 2010 were just as relevant in 1938 as they are today.

In my upcoming book BROADCAST HYSTERIA: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds & the Art of Fake News, I draw upon hundreds of previously unpublished documents to tell the complete and untold story of the broadcast and its effect on the country. My research sheds new light on the production of War of the Worlds, and reveals the true extent of the “panic” that it allegedly inspired. But above all, it demonstrates that Americans in the 1930s grappled with the new medium of radio in much the same way that we today grapple with the new medium of the Internet. Their fears and hopes about the mass media’s power are very similar to our own, and we have much to learn from their insights and mistakes.

BROADCAST HYSTERIA will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on May 5, 2015, one day before the hundredth anniversary of Orson Welles’s birth. It is currently available for pre-order from various retailers (Macmillan, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore, Powell’s, IndieBound, and more). I’ll be blogging regularly over the 187 days leading up to publication, and tweeting from @ABradSchwartz, offering new insights into Welles, War of the Worlds, and Old Time Radio, as well as details on events and book signings I’ll be a part of. Please check back frequently for updates. Welles’s centennial promises to be quite a party, and I hope you’ll join me in celebrating it.

And in honor of Welles, Stewart, and Colbert, I think it’s only fitting that from here on out, October 30 be known as “Fake News Day,” devoted to those irreverent souls who make us think by throwing spitballs at our media.